Camping Indoors
by icepixel
Summary: Early S1. John and Elizabeth amuse themselves during a blackout on Atlantis. UST.


She didn't look up until he'd gotten halfway across her office. This was a new record; she was either really, really tired or completely engrossed in whatever report she had in front of her. Likely it was a combination of both.

"John?" she asked, blinking in the sudden transition from a computer screen under a reading lamp to the relative dimness of the rest of her office.

"Hey, Doc," he replied, coming to stand at the edge of her desk. He set a cup of coffee in front of her. "Thought you could use this."

He could practically see her eyes light up. "_Thank_ you." She brought the silver mug up to her lips.

"Careful, that's—"

She took a deep sip, then grimaced as the liquid burned her mouth. She swallowed it quickly.

"—hot," John finished belatedly.

Elizabeth gave him a weak smile. "Thanks anyway." She blew lightly on the coffee to cool it. "So what brings you here at..." a glance at her watch confirmed the time. "Almost midnight? Don't you have a mission briefing at seven thirty tomorrow morning?"

He raised an eyebrow. "One which I believe you are also required to attend."

She had the grace to blush.

"But to answer your question..." Before he could do so, the meager lighting in the room, including the little green circle that indicated Weir's laptop was receiving power from an outside source, died, leaving them in the blueish glow coming from the LCD screen.

Elizabeth wasted no time in speaking into her radio headset. "McKay, Grodin, what's going on?"

After a moment's pause, McKay's voice came out of the little speaker. "One of the naquadah generators just failed. Power's out over half the city. The Gateroom should be okay, though, at least for now."

"I'll be right there," she replied, then cut the connection. She stood up and grabbed the cup of coffee. "But not without this." She and John exchanged a smile before they headed to the Gateroom.

* * *

"Ma'am, I don't think there's really anything you can do to help out here," said Alexei Porikov in a harried, lightly accented voice. The power room was noisy enough already when everything was running smoothly, and with about twenty engineers running around and shouting to one another, it was hard to hear the Russian man's voice over the din.

Elizabeth smiled. "Is that a polite way of telling me to get lost?"

Porikov looked horrified. "Of course not, Doct—"

She laughed. "It's okay. You're right, I can't be of much use here. I'll be in the Gateroom if anyone does need me." Porikov gave her a relieved nod and hurried away to do something complicated with a naquadah generator.

Elizabeth had barely turned around when she ran into McKay. "Dr. Weir, I think we're close to fixing this—there's a faulty connection somewhere between the generator and our electrical system, as far as we can tell—but we're eventually going to have to cut off all power to the city, probably within the next half hour or so. There'll be enough to keep the lights on in the Gateroom, but that's it."

"That's where I'll be if you need me," she replied, and he nodded before scurrying off to yell at one of the junior engineers.

Flashlight in hand, Elizabeth groped her way back up to the Gateroom, where she found a few people monitoring power levels, communicating with the engineers working to restore power, or otherwise working. A larger contingent appeared to be there purely to take advantage of the lights being on. She checked in with Grodin, who told her in very polite terms to quit bothering him and let him get on with his work.

"Come on," said John, who had suddenly appeared at her side. "Let's go be useless out of the way."

"Let me know if anything changes," she told Grodin. He nodded, and she allowed John to lead her away from the crowd.

She followed him to a quiet corner of the Gateroom. The emergency light overhead had burned out in this particular spot, which she soon found was why he had chosen it.

Never one to let an opportunity for sleep go wasted, John plopped down against the wall and tried to pretend he was laying in a nice, soft bed. He was surprised when Elizabeth didn't follow. Instead, she glanced back over her shoulder at the engineers scurrying around the Gateroom. She took a step back towards the entrance to the alcove, fretting, "Maybe I should..."

"E-liz-a-beth," John said, emphasizing each syllable of her name. She returned her gaze to him as he reached up and grabbed her hand. He tugged gently, thinking just to pull her closer, but he ended up pulling her off-balance and rather awkwardly—not to mention painfully—onto his lap.

She was the first to recover. "Oh, God, John, I'm sorry..." She attempted to stand up, but was making an even bigger mess of things with her squirming, so he grabbed her around the waist to keep her from, say, accidentally kneeing him in the groin,

Thankfully, she hadn't fallen at _quite_ the right angle to cause the white-hot pain he remembered from accidents on his bicycle as a kid, but she'd knocked the wind out of him. When he could speak once more, he said, "It's okay, really." He helped her move off of his lap and over to his side. "And see, this is why you need sleep. There's nothing you can do to help any of the geeks right now."

She _was_ having trouble staying awake, now that she was sitting down. When she tilted her head up and back and wound up seeing two Johns, Elizabeth realized she probably could do with some sleep. "All right. But just for an hour."

* * *

Doctors Beckett and McKay stared bemusedly at the sight in front of them. Eventually, Beckett asked, "D'you think we should wake them?"

McKay grinned in a way that might be called sinister. "Not before we take some pictures," he declared. "Stay right here and don't let anyone wake them up," he instructed before scurrying off to get his digital camera.

Beckett returned his gaze to the two people sitting in front of him. Sheppard was leaning against the wall, his legs stretched out in front of him, snoring softly. He had an arm draped loosely around Elizabeth's waist. She was curled up next to him, practically on top of him, her head resting against his shoulder. A thin line of drool connected her mouth to his shirt. Beckett slowly grinned. They _were_ cute. And photos would make such good blackmail.

A minute later, McKay returned, camera in hand. He stood a few feet in front of the sleeping commanders and quickly snapped several shots from various angles. Eventually, the flash resulted in Weir opening her eyes.

She looked blearily around at her surroundings. Early morning sunlight was streaming through the windows, and Rodney was, for some reason, taking her picture. Something soft and warm was laid out beside her, and...oh, crap.

She lifted her head off John's shoulder and held out her hand. "Rodney. Camera. Now."

McKay stopped taking pictures. "Uh, sorry, Dr. Weir, this is sensitive information. I can't let you have it." Seeing that she was about to stand up and grab the camera from him, he turned and half-walked, half-ran back to his lab to upload the photos to his laptop.

Elizabeth settled back down with a sigh. She exchanged a glance with Beckett, who gave her an apologetic smile and a shrug before leaving to join McKay at his laptop.

She nudged Sheppard with her elbow. "Wake up, John."

"Nnggggguh," was his first response, but eventually he blinked himself into wakefulness. "Elizabeth?"

"Good morning."

"Hi."

Elizabeth abruptly realized that they were sitting _very_ close together. If she looked closely enough, she could see the little ring of blue in his otherwise-green eyes. She was acutely aware of his arm around her waist, and even more cognizant of the fact that it didn't exactly feel unpleasant.

"I should warn you that the next time you overrule McKay on a mission, you may find a picture of this posted in the dining hall." She touched his hand where his fingers rested lightly against her hip, and practically saw understanding dawn on his face. "Come to think of it, Carson may have a little more ammunition the next time one of us wants him to go through the Stargate."

John grimaced at the thought of McKay having blackmail on him, and moved his free hand to his neck massage the crick out. Along the way, he ran into the damp spot Elizabeth's drool had made on his shoulder. "You drooled on me!"

"You were the one who told me to go to sleep."

"That was _not_ an invitation to drool on my jacket."

"Sorry." She tried to look repentant, but the sly smile that broke through ruined the act.

He mock-glared at her for a moment more, then used the wall to lever himself off the floor. Entirely too many joints popped for his liking. He held out a hand for Elizabeth, and she used it to stand up far more gracefully. He made a conscious decision not to be jealous.

She looked at her watch, and her face fell just a bit. "What?" he asked, then looked at his own watch. "Oh."

The numbers on it spelled out 7:29.

With matching sighs, they headed to the conference room.

* * *

All right, campers, there's a story behind this one. Over the past week, I've been trying to finish or work on no fewer than ten fics in three different fandoms. I have literally managed about five sentences on each of them, and it's driving me _up a wall_. So I looked through my files for something, _anything_, I could finish, in the hopes that it would jumpstart my writing process on things I actually wanted to finish, and I came upon this, which needed only a few paragraphs more.

I wrote about three quarters of this roughly a month after Atlantis started airing. I have not seen or really even _thought_ about this show for...three? four? years now. So this may or may not actually fit with canon _at all_. Mainly I wrote it as an exercise in _finishing something, for the love of god_. But hopefully it was still be amusing!


End file.
